


The Larger Hope

by Lassarina



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Post-Virmire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 07:16:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17956028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassarina/pseuds/Lassarina
Summary: After Virmire, Shepard must acknowledge the choices she's made and hope they were worth it.





	The Larger Hope

The door of her quarters slides shut behind her. Shepard hears it close, but even so, she glances over her shoulder, then takes in the room to ensure it’s empty before she lets her shoulders sag.

The bed is too far, even in shipboard quarters. She lowers herself slowly, stiffly, into the desk chair and closes her eyes against the sting that she will admit, alone, is from tears. 

Deciding who lives or dies is the worst part of her job. It doesn’t matter that Ash volunteered--practically demanded--to stay. At the end of the day, as commander, she chose one life over another. This is different than sending soldiers out for flanking maneuvers or commanding in the field, when there’s at least as much influence from pure blind luck and others’ skill as there is from her choices. It’s different than the split second decisions she makes about where to fire or whom she’ll cover. She calculated the value of their lives, and judged Alenko’s mission with the STG more important than Williams’s.

She lets her head fall back against the chair and the tears fall at last. She is the last person the commander checks in on; she’s talked to the rest of the crew, one by one, made sure they’re steady and that she’s done all she can do to cushion this loss. There is no one to do it for her. Liara tried, but Shepard waved her off--it’s more than she feels she can ask of Liara right now, with the wounds of Benezia’s loss so fresh, and this isn’t personal. It’s the price of command. Her crew has paid enough of that price for her today. 

In officer training, one of the first lessons was not to become friends with subordinates. This is the reason why. An officer must be able to make these choices. In the way of many young soldiers, she’d thought she could do better. And in some ways, her deeper knowledge of her crew did help her make this choice.

But she remembers Ash’s faith in a higher power, and her love of poetry--both traits she’d found odd in a grounded marine. Tomorrow she has to compose the formal letter to Ash’s family, the trite words thanking them for her service and sacrifice and blandly saying that these things do not replace what they’ve lost, but the Alliance values them.

Every time she’s lost a soldier, Shepard has written a separate letter to those family members she knew through the eyes of the lost, a story she thinks the family will like or a memory of something that’s so intensely emblematic of her relationship with her crew. She’ll do that this time for each of Ash’s sisters, and her mother, and if she cries while she writes it, no one on the _Normandy_ will see or hear it. Hiding her tears is her duty; writing the letters is her privilege.

For the time being--her attention always divided, in case Joker needs her, or something worse happens--she gives herself space from the weight of duty and privilege both, and looks up poetry on the extranet. Ash liked Tennyson, she recalls, and she keys in the search query, reading first the poet's biography, and then selecting from the list of works. She sits, reading it through her tears, and remembering the awe and joy in Ash’s voice when she spoke her favorite passages.

In _Ulysses,_ which Ash had said was her father's favorite, she finds something that makes her catch her breath too hard--

_Death closes all: but something ere the end,  
Some work of noble note, may yet be done_

It's too precise, too close to the mark. Is this what Ash loved about it, the ability of words from centuries past to speak to the present? Shepard wishes she could ask.

She reads more, voraciously, until the stiffness in her neck tells her she had damn well better get to sleep or she'll be worthless tomorrow. She leaves the page open, a passage highlighted, and looks over her shoulder one last time as she starts to strip down, stark black against a white screen.

_I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,_  
And gather dust and chaff, and call  
To what I feel is Lord of all,  
And faintly trust the larger hope. 

She'll see to it Ash isn't dead in vain, that her death serves the larger hope. She makes the vow in silence, with no witnesses, but it means all the more for it.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, prompt "Terrible Choices."


End file.
